Lines Crossed
In fact, it is because the rule of the game, as produced by the ruling class, is that both Republicans and Democrats will gladly lose an election--even if they think they've been cheated out of it--before they will raise challenges that might reveal the profound deficiencies of our constitutional, undemocratic electoral process and "undermine faith" in it.
Until Donald Trump.
Because the ultimate riposte to everything I've said is: "OK. The Democrats are as hypocritical about this as the Republicans. They flip the discourse about 'stolen' elections as it suits them. But the Democrats--Boxer in 2004, Clinton and Pelosi in 2016--didn't call people out in the streets, didn't bring thousands to Washington to protest militantly, let alone to storm the Capitol."
True that. To which I say: "Why not?"
If an election was "hijacked," "stolen," "illegitimate" as the Democrats have charged a number of times, with reason, why didn't they organize militant demonstrations with activists, internet muckrakers, and civil rights groups, up to and including storming the Capitol? There is no political crime worse than stealing an election. It's the person/party who gets away with that that has succeeded in a coup. Again, if you just keep letting it happen, then you don't care that much democracy and free and fair elections. And you should. That much.
Because, guess what? Sooner or later, someone will lead people into the streets about it. Donald Trump broke the rule. He crossed the red line by doing what Gore, Kerry, et. al., had obediently refrained from doing: He stubbornly refused to concede and instead brought a lot of angry people in the streets to protest the result of an election, "undermining faith" in the electoral process itself. From the ruling class's point of view, that is anathema.
That it all ended up in a riotous incursion into the Capitol that had the legislators cowering under their desks only made it worse. That result was probably not--and, based on what he said, couldn't legally be proven to be--his intent, but, politically, from the Democrats' and the ruling class's point of view, it was his fault.
And the retribution was fast and furious. As the New York Times put it "Corporate America Flexe[d] Its Political Muscle." In an absolutely unprecedented theater of discipline, Donald Trump, still the sitting president, was cancelled with prejudice by a full roster of the corporate and financial elite from Silicon Valley to Wall Street: Dow Jones, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the PGA, etc.--i.e., the ruling class. Even Fox turned against him. In many cases, this cancellation extended to halting donations to "any member of Congress" who opposed certifying Biden's electoral victory. Clearly, this was serious business to business.
The ruling class is outraged at Donald Trump for one reason: Pitchforks. Angry people invaded the office. Trump always talked like he was an anti-establishment bull; this time he actually broke some china. He brought thousands of angry people into the streets and didn't keep them within the red lines of acceptable, non-threatening, protest. The "mob"--the very thing the anti-democratic Founding Fathers evoked to gain acceptance for their anti-democratic constitutional and electoral system--overran the Hallowed Halls of Congress.
Unlike Obama, who assured the oligarchs that he was standing "between you and the pitchforks," Trump brought the pitchforks to the castle. Which is why Obama is being lavishly rewarded, and Trump severely punished, by the ruling class. Trump is being treated as a class traitor.
Let's not pretend we don't know this. Whatever leftists--and certainly those who identify with the revolutionary socialist position--want to say about the January 6th action, the ruling class's comprehensive rage, and fear, about it is for no other reason than that thousands of angry people, out of their control, breached the seat of power and scared the asses sitting there.
The popular anger that was on display on January 6th is what they are afraid of and will not forgive Trump for inciting--not because, in this instance, it was in any way threatening a "coup" or "insurrection" that would have overthrown the government, or even "prevented the transition," but because they are afraid of the example of popular anger being mobilized as a political and historical force by anyone they don't control. They were and are not afraid of Trump, whom they wrangled into submission during his tenure, who demonstrated his subservience again by denouncing the demonstrators with the establishment's framing, and whom they have now publicly humiliated. They are afraid of popular anger that might be mobilized by a competent (maybe even left) political leadership to storm the institutions of the state for reasons that really do threaten their wealth and power--which is a goal every revolutionary socialist should embrace.
Excuse me, but while I was watching January 6th unfold, my overwhelming thought wasn't: "How terrible that they're breaching the security of our sacred institutions!" It was: "Why aren't we doing that?" By "we," I mean the people who need healthcare, jobs, homes, and a decent and secure social life, mobilized by a theoretically and organizationally prepared left leadership; by "that," I mean every tactic of militant protest we saw on January 6th and many other times in the United States--including forcing our way into government and legislative buildings (Wisconsin, 2011), fighting the cops (George Floyd protests last summer and too many others to count), and (the best so far) making them cower under their desks.
(Yes, I oppose gratuitously beating a cop or anyone else, or killing someone climbing in a window, but I do not think discrete incidents like these define the political point of mass actions.)
Can leftists who are rushing to join the entire ruling class in legally and politically criminalizing Donald Trump's speech as actionable "sedition" and "domestic terrorism" be forgetting that the modern history of anti-racist, anti-war, and anti-capitalists struggle is filled with speeches ringing with calls to fight injustice "By any means necessary"!? Often followed by fighting cops and burning sh*t down. Can they think the apparatuses they are reinforcing won't be criminalizing those orators? Can they imagine that any of the hundreds of millions of adults in the United States who are not in their bubble will fail to see the hypocrisy in play?
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
